I have broad interests and experience as a journalist, covering the auto business, the consumer-packaged goods industry, entrepreneurship, and others, as well as politics, culture, media and religion. I used to cover the car business for The Wall Street Journal, which nominated me and some colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize for our coverage of General Motors. I've also covered autos for Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com, Automotive News and Advertising Age. I am a major contributor to Chief Executive Magazine, Brandchannel.com, Townhall Magazine, New Nutrition Business magazine and the Journal, among other outlets. I hope that having lived around Flyover Country for most of my life gives me a grounded perspective.

Memo To McCann, Mahoney: Come Up With Better Volt Ads

Now that the other shoe has dropped for Chevy advertising — the end of its relationship with Goodby Silverstein, not long after the brand shucked the ineffective slogan conceived by the agency — the next move by McCann should be this: a fresh, significant new campaign for Volt.

And that may be just what Chevy’s new CMO, Tim Mahoney, orders up upon taking the reins of his new job after a highly regarded two-year stint as CMO of Volkswagen of America.

Sales-wise, Volt has continued tacking to and fro depending on how many of the car GM is manufacturing and, especially, how well the company is doing in meeting the strong demand for a California-ized, car-pool-lane-eligible version of the plug-in hybrid that was introduced last year.

In February, for example, Volt sales were 43 percent ahead of January, but that was mainly because GM was short of stock for a while, not because of a huge surge in underlying demand for the car.

GM plans to build as many as 36,000 Volts and other plug-in hybrids (including the start of production of the sibling new Cadillac ELR) this year, or about 1,500 to 3,000 a month, according to Bloomberg, while it sold about 30,000 Volts and similar Opel Ampera models last year.

That would represent an output increase of as much as 20 percent, but in a U.S. market where electrified vehicles of all sorts continue to face a short-term acceptability challenge, don’t expect demand for Volt genuinely to mushroom anytime soon, no matter how good its advertising might become.

And yet, Volt’s inconsistent sales performance masks the much more formidable reality of the car itself.

Plug-in hybrids remain the type of electrified vehicle that makes the most sense because they release the driver from dependence only on a battery-fed powertrain.

And while competing makes have been introducing their own plug-ins, Chevrolet Volt remains not only the pioneer for this technology but also very much the face of it. Just as Toyota’s Prius brand still dominates conventional hybrids, there’s no reason Volt shouldn’t continue to be the best-selling plug-in hybrid by far.

But from the very launch of Volt three years ago, GM arguably has done a poor overall job of communicating that identity and has failed to mainstream the vehicle perceptually among American consumers so that Volt would have a shot at joining the mainstream of U.S. auto sales.

One of GM’s first mistakes was assigning Volt a status not very much unlike all the other Chevy models under the “Chevy Runs Deep” tag line and positioning. Clearly, the idea was for the acknowledged cutting-edge technology of Volt to provide a halo to the rest of the Chevy lineup.

But while the brand re-dressing conceived by then-CMO Joel Ewanick didn’t do much for the entire Chevrolet lineup, it did a particular disservice to Volt. This was a car that Chevy should have set apart unequivocally from the rest of its brand, right out of the chute, instead of largely subsuming Volt’s unique identity into a re-branding of the entire marque that went unfortunately awry.

Meanwhile, Chevy also allowed Nissan to take an unanswered shot at Volt in a TV ad for the all-electric Leaf that showed a Volt owner standing in the “old-fashioned” pose of having to fill his tank with that awful stuff, gasoline.

Chevy’s more recent Volt-only TV-ad campaign featuring testimonials about the car from real owners was more effective and got closer to communicating the passion that many Volt owners feel for their plug-in.

But, now helmed by Mahoney and with McCann as the only creative agency involved, Chevy advertising should do more and better by Volt.

What, exactly?

For one thing, the Mahoney-McCann team should be able to figure out a way to drive home the huge advantage that Volt, as a plug-in hybrid, enjoys over the all-electric wanna-bes. It has a highly fuel-efficient gasoline engine that gives Volt drivers a peace of mind and a confidence about not being stranded that drivers of Nissan Leaf and other EVs can only envy — coupled with most of the advantages of being able to drive Volt in electric-only mode when desired.

Maybe the new honchos of Chevy advertising could steal a page from Audi and agency Venables Bell & Partners, which produced the insightful and hilarious “Green Police” ad that debuted during the 2010 Super Bowl. In the ad promoting the clean-diesel version of the Audi A3, ordinary citizens are high-handedly arrested for using plastic instead of paper, for possessing old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs and even for not recycling orange rinds.

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